The era of turbomanipulation

Let's look with the puppy. Mississippi CreamAlan Parker's film, starring a young Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman at the height of his career, was shot in the 80s and portrays the 60s and the racist violence of those who refused to grant rights to Black people. But revisited in 2025, it ends up being painfully relevant: the hateful language that appears, which at the time might have seemed like a reminder of a bygone era, resonates strongly with the entire (let's say) MAGA philosophy and the white supremacy that Trump has never unequivocally condemned. In one scene, villagers are seen answering a reporter while being filmed, and their arguments are similar to those of Vox (or Alianza). It's also messed up to see how the techniques of denying facts, decontextualizing, and manipulating were already in place six decades ago and have now only been turbo-perfected.

These days I'm also reading Joan Didion's non-fiction. What a marvel. Although I'm currently reading the book that recounts the death of her daughter Quintana, and the bulk of what it says is psychological in nature (all those signs we failed to detect that foreshadowed a disaster), there's a reflection that also seems relevant to me, and which helped me digest the Sant Esteve cannelloni. The author speaks of the importance of the internal order of a sentence and likens it to film editing: shots that portray an objective truth can end up suggesting—through juxtaposition—something different. The classic example: the same shot of a man looking out the window will express hunger or desire depending on whether, in the next shot, a waiter walks by with a succulent chicken or a girl dressed in summer clothes. Much of today's journalistic manipulation is like this: it's not fabricated news or outright lies, but rather sentences with twists that conceal the necessary context or artificially created causes and effects. It was like that in the time of Cream Mississippi And it is today.